Christopher Wray has decided to leave ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration

FBI Director Christopher Wray has announced he will be stepping down from the job, after US President-elect Donald Trump said he wanted to replace him with Kash Patel.

Wray made the announcement at an all-staff town hall on Wednesday.

Trump nominated Wray in 2017, after sacking then-director James Comey over the ‘Russiagate’ scandal.

Wray’s resignation comes two days after Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, wrote an 11-page letter accusing him of mismanagement and “failure to take control of the FBI.”

Earlier this month, Trump – elected to a second term in November – nominated Patel to head the bureau in the next administration. Democrats have opposed the move, arguing that Wray still had several years left in his tenure. 

FBI directors can serve up to ten years under a law passed by Congress after the bureau’s founding head, J. Edgar Hoover, passed away. Hoover was in charge of the FBI and its predecessor for a total of 48 years.

Although Wray was a registered Republican and a Trump appointee, the incoming president criticized his subservience to the Biden administration over the past four years.

“He invaded my home,” Trump said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, referring to the 2022 FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

“I can’t say I’m thrilled” about the FBI, Trump added, citing Wray’s testimony in Congress that his ear had been struck by shrapnel instead of an assassin’s bullet this past July.